Human Rights Watch responds
Human Rights Watch responds to HRW founder Robert Bernstein's critique in The New York Times of the group's treatment of Israel:
Human Rights Watch does not devote more time and energy to Israel than to other countries in the region, or in the world. We've produced more than 1,700 reports, letters, news releases, and other commentaries on the Middle East and North Africa since January 2000, and the vast majority of these were about countries other than Israel. Furthermore, our Middle East division is only one of 16 research programs at Human Rights Watch. The work on Israel is a tiny fraction of Human Rights Watch's work as a whole.
Full statement here.
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Evan Zuesse
10/21/09 08:12 PM
The response of HRW to Bernstein’s severe criticism of its tendency to focus on the alleged human rights violations of the sole democracy in the Middle East, ignoring or playing down the blatant atrocities of Israel’s enemies and neighboring authoritarian states, is basically to fudge the issue. The HRW statement just blathers on with generalities, most of them either misleading or untrue (e.g., HRW may occasionally issue critical responses to human rights violations by Syria, Saudi Arabia or for that matter Fatahstan or Hamastan, but these are much fewer than those directed against Israel, much briefer, and much more quickly relegated to yesterday’s news not just by the media, but also by HRW itself - no major news conferences on specific reports, no appeals to the UN, no repetition of accusations for months afterwards).
Furthermore, the HRW actually does not address Bernstein’s question of why HRW chooses to so emphasize criticism of the sole open and stable democracy in the Middle East, reversing its mandate established by Bernstein himself. It merely rejects his challenge to focus instead on the many far more abusive closed societies, without giving any justification for it.
It is thus a thoroughly insincere response. Perhaps nothing better can be expected of an organization that, like its former Board member Richard Goldstone himself, has the intrenched habit of treating all Palestinian atrocity claims, even those produced in Hamas propaganda studios, with deep respect, while ignoring or discrediting those from Israeli official sources or pro-Israeli independent testimonies and analyses.
HRW is a partisan adjunct of propaganda units run by Israel’s enemies. Its Muslim and anti-Zionist bias is blatant, whatever disclaimers it issues, and it is now thoroughly discredited, at least as regards issues relating to Muslims and Jews and democratic societies generally. Hopefully it will still do some occasional good work in whatever problematic and authoritarian human rights areas are left in the world that are not Muslim-related.